


Static

by TaleWorthTelling



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Guardian Angels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 11:52:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14873258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaleWorthTelling/pseuds/TaleWorthTelling
Summary: The AU where Bucky really died falling from the train and became a guardian angel to a little girl.





	Static

**Author's Note:**

> I ended up setting this one aside years ago because the possibilities were sort of overwhelming, but I still think it's a neat concept, so I'm leaving it here and letting it go.

There was no bright light. What there was, well, was a howl of noise and a rush of colors, disorienting as all hell after the vacuum in his ears as he was falling. He never hit the ground, as far as he could tell. He felt kind of cheated about the light thing. There were people he’d been looking forward to seeing when his time came. It didn’t seem likely now.

When he blinked hard to ground himself, it felt wrong. It took him a moment to realize that that was because it didn’t feel like anything at all, the ghost of a memory of blinking, maybe, and in that moment he realized something else that seemed somewhat of a salient detail.

He was in a delivery room watching the miracle of life take place not six fucking inches from his hip.

He yelped and jumped backwards, trying not to knock over the stainless steel table behind him, but it was a fool’s errand; he fell right through it in his haste not to be a nuisance. He couldn’t touch it at all, and while he remembered what it felt like to fall – God, did he ever – the swoop of your stomach, the anticipation of pain, the shock of the ground … none of those things happened either. He was standing, he was falling, then he wasn’t, simple as that.

No pain, no shock, no swoop. No ground for Bucky Barnes.

He’d already gotten an eyeful of the business end of a birth canal and that was about all he needed to see, so he sat on the illusion floor, and listened to the woman snarl and cry and scream, and waited for something to happen that meant anything at all in his scrambled brains, any connection that would make sense of this fever dream. Then he hyperventilated.

Because when that wailing kid flew out, writhing and twitching and  _real_ , he fucking  _dove_  for that tiny thing, ‘cause the assholes in the room weren’t fast enough to do their one job: get that kid safely into his mother’s waiting, weary arms without dropping it onto the floor first.

And he felt the weight resting squarely in his arms, even if his eyes told him that all he’d done was slow its descent. No one was fucking falling on his watch, and that floor looked awful hard.

The geniuses who’d dropped it in the first place sighed in relief, glancing nervously at each other, and Bucky snorted, ‘cause wasn’t that just about right. They looked it over, swaddled it in a blanket, and pronounced it a feisty four pound girl.

Her mother looked down at her in baffled amazement and spoke to her like she was the only person in the room, the only person she’d ever need to see again. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, God, you’re beautiful, baby. You’re so perfect. Hello, I’ve been talkin’ to you for months. Nice of you to show up.”

She looked so happy, so shocked, so  _reverent,_ and Bucky felt a pull in his gut that led him closer to the edge of the bed. He looked down into the tiny, wizened face of the little girl, and he couldn’t explain the swell of protectiveness that lodged itself into his chest. All he knew was that this moment meant something.

Damned if he knew why, ‘cause he’d never seen this woman before in his life, and he’d never forget a pretty (if sweaty) girl like that, dark skin and brown eyes in a heart-shaped face. And he’d definitely remember if he’d slept with her, which he hadn’t, so it couldn’t be his.

He took a moment to think about whether or not it made him kind of an asshole to have that whole train of thought standing (completely unbeknownst to her) next to a woman who’d just given birth.

Did it matter, though, really? No one seemed to notice him, he couldn’t interact with anything except that kid, and if this was the afterlife, someone was going to have to explain it to him. Maybe he’d cracked his skull open on a rock and this was the final bizarre machination of his addled brain while he slowly bled to death in an icy ditch.

He awkwardly milled around the room, and sometime between realizing that his chest didn’t rise and fall when he inhaled and exhaled and the panic that followed, a woman in a flapper dress appeared in the room and tapped him on the shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she said hurriedly. “There was a mix-up and I had to sort out a sticky spot.”

Bucky wasn’t proud of the vehement, spirited,  _colorful_  swearing that followed for a solid thirty seconds, but, fuck, that was not how a lady sneaked up on a guy who’d just plummeted to his death and woken up somewhere completely unexpected. He kind of thought that it was justified.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I was supposed to be here to get you settled in.”

He gaped like a fish. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked hoarsely, voice wrecked.

She was clearly used to the question, because she understood him just fine. She shook her head briskly, her pretty blonde hair bouncing in its perfectly set waves, apple red lips pursed in a frown. “That doesn’t matter. What matters, Bucky, is that that little girl” – she pointed vaguely behind her – “is going to need a lot of help, and you’re in the position to do it.”

“Where the fuck am I?” he tried. Surely there had to be  _some_  method to the madness. There had to be  _something_  she could say that would make sense. “Is this purgatory? It doesn’t look like Hell. I don’t think I belong in Hell; that wouldn’t be right. I did okay, I think, you should know that. I ain’t a bad guy. I even paid my taxes. Really, what the fuck is going on?”

She stared at him in compete silence, totally still, her blue eyes narrowing. He growled in frustration and sat down on the floor to rest his face in his cupped hands, legs suddenly gone to liquid.

“You are where you need to be,” she said finally. The sounds of the room had muted, almost gone, and the sharpness of the colors had faded to a fuzzy gray behind her. She alone seemed to be the brightest spot in the room. “Born July twenty-sixth, nineteen-hundred and eighty-eight. Twelve-oh-two ante meridiem. She weighs four pounds, two ounces; will lose four ounces in the next forty-eight hours, and will gain them back by the first of August. She will quickly be transferred to the neo-natal intensive care unit five hours from now when the nurses on duty discover her losing color and respiring shallowly. She will remain in an incubator for two weeks and be sent home on the seventh, when it will rain four inches and flood a nearby river. Her mother, Rebecca, will refuse help offered from family and friends, as she intends to prove herself strong and worthy of raising this child independently.

“Bucky Barnes, you are the force in this child’s life. You are her center, her rest, her drive. She will depend on her mother for life, for sustenance, for nurturing and love and support. She will depend on her community for guidance and worth. She will depend on the world for purpose.

“She will depend on you for all of these things, but your purpose, James, is to teach her to find these things in herself.”

He swallowed, dazed. “Can I …” He coughed. “Can I get a name? This kid I’m supposed to look out for?”

She smiled beatifically. “Jamie,” she breathed. “Jamie Jones.”

 

* * *

  


 

Time was funny at the moment, but it seemed like she was gone pretty fast. The long and short of it was, basically, that Bucky was on guard duty for this kid for the foreseeable future. He was kind of experienced with that, actually. He knew what it was like to be consumed by the need to protect and support another person, to find your worth intrinsically linked to theirs. That was familiar.

It hurt, in a distant, growing toothache sort of way, but he recognized it from somewhere. Someone … someone had fervently captured his heart in just this way, and someone like that you ought to remember, right?

All he remembered was someone screaming his name and a rush of wind in his ears, pain in his shoulder that he couldn’t account for. It stayed with him even though he didn’t breathe like a person anymore and didn’t seem to feel anything else. Kept him grounded when he wanted to cry like a baby and shriek at the sky.

He wasn’t sure whether you were supposed to grieve for your own life, but since he was aware enough to be thinking about it in the first place, he assumed that it couldn’t be too unheard of. Too shameful. So he grieved what he’d lost, and he mourned what he couldn’t remember, growing dimmer by the hour. Memories slipped through his fingers like water through a sieve, down a drain, snaking ever away from him; people he knew he’d loved, moments that gave him power and strength, ideas that filled him with fire and longing alike.

Gone. He’d coated himself in their ashes like warpaint, but he didn’t know what it meant; only that he had to keep it with him, lest he lose himself, too.

He stayed in the hospital nursery and watched Jamie breathe for five straight hours until, sure enough, her breath began to falter. He screamed for a nurse, tried to rattle the observation windows, but no one seemed to hear him except the tiny baby bearing his name. She clenched her little fists and waved them weakly. Finally, as a nurse walked down the adjacent hallway, he summoned his will and snarled fiercely. She faltered in her step for a moment and, eyes wide, he yanked the back of her uniform (which didn’t look right for a nurse, now that he thought about it, but he couldn’t quite puzzle out why).

She shuddered. But she walked into the nursery, saw the baby, and sounded the alarm.

Things continued in that vein until Jamie left the hospital with Rebecca. He split his time between the two until Rebecca was discharged (only a few days later, but more than a week before Jamie was pronounced hearty enough to leave) because he figured that he ought to know both of them if he was going to help either one. Rebecca was clearly over the moon about the baby, but she was also just as clearly overwhelmed, growing more so by the day. She hid it well, but he had nothing to do but observe her, and so it was plain as day across her face.

When they went home, he left with them. The journey was difficult to describe, because he didn’t exactly  _leave_  with them, the way one would conventionally leave a place. He was still getting the hang of this traveling thing;  _walking_  from room to room was kind of awkward, like a pilot adjusting for the horizon so he didn’t fly into the ground. He was in the hospital, he was looking out the window, he was blurring, and then he was standing in a half-furnished apartment smelling of charcoal dust and soap. He was pretty sure the smells weren’t real, were from his imagination, because he was equally sure that he couldn’t smell anything any more than he drew breath. His interactions with the physical world were complicated.

Honestly, the fact that he no longer slept was by far the most disturbing and hardest to get used to. He didn’t get tired. He’d spent a whole damn lifetime exhausted for one reason or another, and now his eyes were open and wide. It wasn’t that he had energy, even, so much as a disconnect from his body in general. He wasn’t sure if he inhabited a body at all any longer or if he was a mere psychic construct.

The afterlife was fucking complicated, okay?

Either way, the fact was that he didn’t sleep, so he spent a lot of time watching his two new charges sleep and thinking about the future, since the past was so goddamn fuzzy. Spent a lot of nights wondering what was so special about this kid and what qualified him to be her keeper. She was tiny, born more than a month early, it turned out, and she didn’t really cry like he thought babies were supposed to. She looked like any other baby he’d ever seen and Rebecca looked like any new mother with no help.

When Jamie stirred in the night, he unthinkingly soothed her, smoothing the backs of his fingers over her forehead and humming a melody like a prayer. She seemed to feel it, even though he couldn’t always. He expected the warmth of her skin and sometimes got air, but to her it was always real. She’d never known anything different.

What was this girl going to mean to the world that meant he had to protect her? Was her future written? That’s what the flapper-wearing apparition had made it seem like. But then why would they need him if they already knew what was going to happen?

During the days he busied himself entertaining Jamie, making faces at her and telling jokes that she couldn’t understand just so she’d hear his voice, and trying to calm Rebecca, who was quickly showing the strain. She needed to go back to work, and soon, and there was no one to watch the baby, so she was calling around town trying to find a nanny who wouldn’t bankrupt her. Bucky wasn’t crazy about that. He had, in fact, gotten kind of used to the kid, and he didn’t want to leave her with a stranger.

So he wasn’t proud of this, but he sabotaged a lot of otherwise successful interviews. Not without reason, understand. He just didn’t get a good vibe from any of those people. So he blew down the backs of their shirts, tapped on the walls erratically, slung an arm around one’s shoulders, laughed maniacally from around the corner, and managed to subtly suggest to Rebecca opening the windows in a way that produced a downright disturbing draft that slammed doors open and shut at random.

They all left quickly.

Rebecca was upset, but although Bucky tried to explain himself to her, tried to reason, she obviously couldn’t hear his words, even if she was beginning to feel his presence.

The phone had rung enough times that he was starting to get a feel for the family dynamics at play keeping them apart. They seemed like good folks to him, and it was a damn shame they hadn’t seen the kid, and that Rebecca was driving herself crazy like this when help was not only a phone call away, but also pretty insistent.

She was running down her savings and needed to do something about it soon.

Finally, one night as Rebecca was bathing Jamie in the kitchen sink, Bucky straight up asked her, “Why won’t you see your family, Rebecca? They sound like they care about you. What did they do that you can’t forgive?”

“They didn’t believe in me,” she murmured to herself, then paused, surprised.

Bucky was pretty surprised, too. She’d heard him, even if she didn’t realize.

“They’ll believe in you now, Rebecca,” he said, instead of lingering on the hows and whys. “They’ll see how much you love this baby girl and how real she is and they’ll help you. Not a one of us can survive on our own stubbornness.”

_Not a one of us can survive on our own stubbornness._  That thought lodged in his throat like a fishbone. Where the hell had he heard that before? Had he said it to someone?

He thought again of falling and screaming and pushed that thought away. Another time, maybe. Or not ever.

“They didn’t believe in me,” she said again, louder and with growing conviction. “They said I was selfish to keep her when I couldn’t do right by her, that I should get rid of her before I destroyed my life.”

“But she’s here now,” he countered. “And they miss you. I can hear it in your mama’s voice. She’s been cryin’. She wants you back.”

“They’re gonna judge me,” she continued, sniffling as quietly as she could. She didn’t need to marshal her emotions by herself, just for the baby, and yet she could feel him and reacted accordingly. “They’re gonna tell me everything I’m doing wrong.”

“And you’ll survive,” he said sternly. “Listen, you can do anything you set your mind to. It’s all possible. Trust me, I‘ve seen some crazy shi – stuff. But you don’t  _have_  to. That’s the point.”

Rebecca finished bathing Jamie in silence. Bucky waited until she’d toweled her off and dried her hands before he tried to pick up the phone and watched his hand plunge right through it.

“Right,” he muttered. He crossed his arms, scratched his chin, shifted his weight from foot to foot out of habit. He thought. Then he shut his eyes and hovered his hands over the phone like a theatrical magician and focused as hard as he could.

He didn’t know if he had powers over the universe or not, but the phone rang, Rebecca picked up, and she finally agreed to let her mother meet the kid and maybe watch her a few afternoons while she went to work.

Bucky sighed in relief.

 

* * *

  


 

It took him longer than he wanted to admit to realize that what had been wrong about the nurses’ uniforms had been wrong with everything else, too. The year was 1988, and that didn’t sound right, but his tongue wouldn’t form the one that did, not right away.

When Jamie was four months old, nestled on the couch in her grandmother’s lap while she watched television, Bucky remembered.

“1945,” he whispered, watching the soldiers march across the little screen in black and white. He felt like he was waking from a trance, slowly wriggling through viscous gel to the light on the other side.

He suddenly realized why the television felt wrong, why the clothes looked different, why the ubiquitous phones seemed astronomically important.

He’d never seen a television up close before he died, he was sure. And nurses had worn white caps and stiff white dresses with stockings. And he’d never had a phone in their apartment.

Their?

His. He meant his apartment.

Anyway, the point was that this was the future. 1945 felt familiar and, the longer he thought about it, watching the letters and photos roll across the screen while a narrator expounded on them, he came to the conclusion that he had once been a soldier. He had carried a rifle through foreign lands with mud on his trousers and letters in his pocket, a name in his heart.

“My name is James Buchanan Barnes,” he said to no one. He sat down heavily onto the couch, no longer fazed by the way he didn’t really sit but imitating it nonetheless. “My friends called me Bucky all my life. I was born in 1920. I would be sixty-eight years old now if I hadn’t fallen off a fucking train.”

Jamie cooed at him. He cooed right back, distracted but indulgent. Grandma Dee, as she’d taken to calling herself, responded as well, playing with Jamie’s toes. She squealed in delight, but her eyes were on Bucky.

He continued to report these facts as he remembered them, reciting them sometimes conversationally, sometimes like his name-rank-serial number as he’d once done in captivity.

He was missing something, though, and it hurt. Fuck, it hurt like that time he’d been shot in the ass and someone had laughed shakily and held his hand while someone else had dug the slug out and – and –

Who the hell was laughing?

God, it was  _right there_ , on the tip of his tongue. Genuine tears sprung to the corners of his eyes, but when he went to irritably wipe them away, he felt nothing, and his hands were dry. He was vibrating with brimming emotion and frustration.

And then, after a commercial break advertising laundry detergent and a public service announcement not to do drugs, his own face filled the screen.

The Howling Commandos. His men. His people.

He kept watching the documentary, enthralled.

“Look,” Dee said, gently poking Jamie in the tummy and pointing at the screen. “Look at that handsome fellow right there. That’s your great-grandfather, you know that? Yeah, that’s my husband’s daddy. They don’t get along, but Gabe is a good man. He’s an interpreter for very important people. He’s a little older now.” She sighed dramatically. “Aren’t we all, sugar?”

Bucky’s heart hadn’t pounded a beat since 1945, but he imagined that he felt it stop anyway when a face more familiar than his own filled the screen, eyes determined and bright. His throat clenched.

The narrator laid out some spiel about how Captain America had devoted himself to God and country, but all Bucky could think about was Steve Rogers from Brooklyn who’d shared a bed with him on cold nights and shared everything else the rest of the time.

Steve, who’d tried and tried until he found his way to make a mark on the world.

Steve, who he’d forgotten.

That was what had been missing all this time, the empty space in his gut that now slithered somewhere down to his toes in shame. How could he have forgotten Steve?

How could he not have felt his lack of presence on this earth, knowing now that he’d given his life in sacrifice like he’d always probably wanted? Now that he knew Steve had been lost in some frozen wasteland and never recovered?

History had written its words and had its say, but this was news to Bucky, and he wept in anger. He bawled and ranted in equal measure until Jamie started crying, too, and he got a hold of himself. She looked up at him with great big eyes, almost knowing, and he got it.

Steve looked out for the little guy, and Bucky looked out for Steve.

Jamie was his little guy now.

He wondered if Steve was off playing chaperone to some lucky kid out there or if he’d earned his rest and found peace. If there was a Heaven, then surely it was for people like Steve who’d brawl with St. Peter for turning someone away.

He ignored the television when it talked about his torture, service, and death. He knew all of that, had felt it in is bones even when the details escaped him.

Instead he turned to Jamie and tried to see Gabe Jones in her face. Didn’t really work. He looked around at the family photos, and sure enough, there was Gabe, older and grayer but full of warmth and life, arms around a woman with a clever smile.

So time passed differently on the other side and his memory wasn’t what he’d thought it was. Well, he’d take care of that.

He spent the afternoon and early evening talking about Steve and their life together, about the Commandos and Gabe in particular; how they’d found some abandoned instruments in a ruined village and Morita had dared him to pick it up and put his lips on it, and it turned out that Gabe played a mean trumpet.

Steve Rogers was dead and Bucky had already forgotten him once. It wasn’t happening again.

This kid would grow up with stories of heroism and stubbornness and skinny kids with weak lungs and giants with big hearts, and polyglot musicians who went to war and came home to their sweethearts, and the dumb sergeant who’d loved them all and followed and guarded fiercely, and he’d leave out the parts about sacrifice if he could, because there was no way he could live through that again, especially not if he was going to watch this kid grow.

Except he wasn’t living through anything, really, was he? He wasn’t living at all.

Jamie smiled when he talked about home. She looked like she was smiling, anyway. It wasn’t like she understood him.

 

* * *

  


 

Jamie had no shortage of people reading her bedtime stories by the time she started kindergarten, but her favorites were clearly the ones that Bucky whispered to her as she fell asleep, painting her dreams in sepia tones with long strokes of courage and friendship. Those were big themes for her. She would talk about them to her family and whoever she could, eager to describe her daydreams in fantastic (and slightly embellished) detail, people he’d described so well that she felt she knew them and would discuss them accordingly.

She was a smart kid.

He hadn’t appeared to her since she’d started learning to talk. Around that time he figured out how to make himself invisible to her eyes but not undetectable to her heart, and he did that for two reasons: one was so that he didn’t confuse a growing child, and two was because he didn’t want her explaining to poor Rebecca about the grown man who hung around her and played with her and told her tall tales.

It might have presented a problem.

So he stopped appearing, but he couldn’t resist the urge to teach her words, so he’d whisper them on the breeze when Rebecca’s back was turned.

Her first word, after “Mama”, was “Buck”, and damned if anyone in the family could figure out why. He heard that when word trickled up to Gabe through the family channels he’d laughed himself silly.

Bucky was pretty pleased with that one.

The thing was, though, that as smart and daring and sociable a little girl as she was … it clearly wasn’t the whole story. She wanted to play with the boys, which was fine and all, even if she was small and had a touch of asthma. She was physical and demonstrative and liked to grab and roughhouse, and someone was always quick to tell her off for not being a good little lady.

Well, that pissed Bucky off. If she didn’t like skirts and wanted to be the sheriff when she and her friends played cops and robbers, then what the hell was the problem?

So he talked baseball with her, when she got old enough that he thought he could let her see him again. It was impossible that she remembered him, but she did, and she threw her arms around his waist and buried her face in his hip. A half-smile quirked his lips, and he ran his fingers over the rough texture of her hair.

“I missed you,” she said. “I know you were there, but I missed you.”

“Well, I won’t leave you again,” he said, crouching down to look her in the eye. She wasn’t conventionally pretty, a little too boyish and angular for a girl, but he thought that she was the most beautiful little person he’d ever seen.

Clearly he was marked for a sap the day he met Steve Rogers.

No one else would show her how to swing a bat, not when she ought to be playing with dolls and trying on her mother’s high heels like her friends, so Bucky taught her. He showed her how to hit a fastball and which pitches to swing at and why it was a better game back when he was growing up, but he’d watch it with her anyway.

She stopped playing baseball after she caught pneumonia at nine years old and scared the daylight out of everyone around her. She’d been kind of a chronically sick little kid, ear infections and colic as a baby and fevers and colds later on, but the day she coughed herself unconscious and Rebecca rushed her to the hospital, he could’ve sworn he’d died all over again. He stayed with Jamie while she was awake, and the rest of the time he spent murmuring soothing words to Rebecca, who was quickly shedding the stoicism she’d run in with.

Jamie was in the hospital for a whole week, and she never breathed quite the same after that. So they stopped playing baseball, but they kept watching it on TV, and she found new hobbies. Bucky had told her that his friend Steve had been a great artist, had drawings for sale in famous museums now and everything (including half-finished sketches not meant for public consumption that Bucky knew Steve would be mortified over), and Jamie wanted to draw just like Bucky’s friend.

He’d listened to Steve talk on and on about art, so he spent a couple of days rattling off what he remembered, which was a surprising amount, and then he left her to it. He’d learned that he could be separated from her briefly, so he hung out in museums and libraries and bus terminals while she was in school sometimes. Even a guardian as single-mindedly devoted as he needed a break sometimes.

He returned one day to find that Jamie had drawn him a mountainside covered in snow with a clumsy train rushing past.

Bucky was badly shaken. He hadn’t shared that story – of course he hadn’t, Jesus – and at first he didn’t know what to say. She was looking at him expectantly, waiting for the pleased reactions he always gave, so he tamped down the nausea and vertigo and rewarded her with a weak smile. She could tell that something was off, but she let it go quickly and grabbed fresh paper to draw some more.

This time she drew a cat, out of proportion and clearly childlike.

He took the picture and taped it up in the basement where he hung out sometimes when he wanted to be alone or to approximate sleeping, which he still hadn’t given up on trying.

There was no way she could have known the significance of that image to him, the power it held over him still. He knew those mountains, and the whole thing was still classified as far as he knew. Where could she possibly have seen them?

He let it go, like he dismissed the dozens of other odd coincidences over the years. Sure, she liked to draw, and, sure, she loathed the smell of freshly cut grass as much as Steve, and, yeah, when he sang her Billie Holiday songs, she closed her eyes happily at the same places Steve had.

Maybe he’d overdone it on the Steve Rogers appreciation front and overeducated her.

Well, what was done was done. He learned to be appreciative of the little reminders.

But he kept the drawing taped up on a pipe to remind him.


End file.
